The inventor of television and South Africa

South Africa’s first television broadcast was on 05 January 1976 at 18:00, with five hours of broadcasting. In her apartment in Yeoville, Johannesburg, Mrs Margaret BAIRD was trying to watch – more than 60 years after her husband invented television. She missed the first television broadcast in South Africa, as her landlord would not allow an antenna to be installed on the apartment building’s roof. She only got an inside antenna (bunny ears) three weeks later.

The South African connection

Margaret Cecilia ALBU was born on 13 March 1907 in Johannesburg, the daughter of Henry ALBU (1856-1927) and Cecilia Anne REID (1871-1946). She was baptised on 30 May 1907 at St Mary’s Anglican Cathedral in Johannesburg. At the time, the family lived at 24 Upper Page Street in Doornfontein, and Henry was a diamond merchant. Margaret died on 14 July 1996 at Avonbridge Nursing Home in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, Scotland. She was cremated at Daldowie Crematorium, Glasgow. Her ashes were placed in the Baird family grave in Helensburgh Cemetery in Scotland.

Her father was an unorthodox Jew. Her paternal grandfather was a rabbi. Henry came from a musical family – three of his sisters were with the Carl Rosa Opera Company. Margaret’s mother had been raised in Yorkshire as an Anglican and emigrated to South Africa in 1903, where she became a teacher. She met Henry in Johannesburg, who had also emigrated from England to seek his fortune in the diamond fields. In 1909, when Margaret’s brother Gordon was born, the family moved to Kimberley, where Henry became a manager at De Beers diamond merchants.

In 1911, Margaret’s mother took her and her brother to England to visit relatives. The children became ill, and they returned to South Africa, where they spent several months recovering in Sea Point, Cape Town. The family then settled in Klerksdorp after Henry started alluvial diamond mining, living in a house close to the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Margaret attended the convent school, studying languages and receiving piano and theory tuition. She went on to achieve Associated Board examination successes with high marks. When she was about nine, the family moved back to Johannesburg, where she continued at another convent and studied for seven years at Miss Maude HARRISON’s Conservatoire of Music, where her teacher was Sydney ROSENBLOOM.

By the age of sixteen, Margaret had completed the Licentiate of Trinity College London and begun performing publicly. In 1925, she travelled with her mother to London, England, to study further. They arrived in Southampton on 13 April 1925 on board the Kildonan Castle. They rented a small apartment in Kensington, and hired an upright piano for Margaret to practise on for eight hours per day.

John was born on 13 August 1888 in Helensburgh, Dunbartonshire, and was the youngest of four children of the Reverend John BAIRD, the Church of Scotland’s minister for the local St Bride’s Church, and Jessie Morrison INGLIS, the orphaned niece of the wealthy Inglis family of shipbuilders from Glasgow. John became an electrical engineer. Although many inventors worked on the development of television, in John was credited as the first to produce a moving television image in 1926. Britain and Germany began using his process for public transmissions three years later.

In September 1925, Margaret obtained the Associate of the Royal College of Music solo performer’s diploma and, early in 1926, the Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music qualification. Margaret immersed herself in London’s musical culture and worked as a concert pianist. From October 1926 to the end of 1927, Margaret was back in South Africa; during this visit her father died, and her mother subsequently left South Africa permanently. Margaret and her brother accompanied her back to England in 1928.

Meeting John Logie Baird

From 16 March 1925, John started demonstrating his invention, the televisor, at Selfridge’s. One of the visitors was an 18-year-old dark-haired music student from South Africa, Margaret. Her mother had read about the demonstrations in the newspaper, and the two women went to Selfridge’s. In 1930, Margaret again met John. She played the piano for a singer in a television broadcast from the Baird company’s studio in Long Acre. They were briefly introduced to John in the studio.

Margaret moved to a house in Sutton, Surrey, where she often played piano in Dan GODFREY’s orchestra in Bournemouth and Julius HARRISON’s orchestra in Hastings. In 1931 John was living in Box Hill with an old school friend, Guy Fullarton ROBERTSON (nicknamed Mephistopheles – Mephy for short). Margaret found life in England unfriendly but had some friends from South Africa living in London, including Jes MITCHELL, also a musician. Jes was hoping to appear on John Baird’s television and was invited to tea in Box Hill, Surrey, to meet him. She took Margaret with her. They were picked up by a driver on Saturday, 01 August 1931, and met John and Mephy at Warne’s Hotel. Later that afternoon, as they were leaving, John asked Margaret for her phone number, which she gave, thinking he would call her for some work in the studios. John called on Monday and invited her to dinner. They saw each other every day that week.

Married in New York

Margaret left England, sailing from Southampton on the Olympic and arriving in New York on 03 November 1931, to meet John in New York, where he was on a business trip. John had been ill, battling with influenza. On 12 November 1931, in Brooklyn, New York, Margaret and John obtained their marriage licence and were married the following day at the Half Moon Hotel on West 29th Street, on the Boardwalk in Coney Island. John’s business connections invited them to a celebration dinner at the Waldorf Astoria when they returned to New York.

John and Margaret settled in Box Hill, Surrey. Margaret was often lonely there, as John went to London every day in his hired Daimler. In January 1932, the couple moved to Swiss Cottage in Bexhill-on-Sea. Nearly every weekend they went to Worthing; John loved the sea, and they spent hours walking along the waterfront. The couple had two children: Diana Margaret Cecilia Jessie, born on 09 May 1932 in London, and Malcolm Henry Inglis, born on 02 July 1935 in London. Diana married Norman RICHARDSON, former principal in English at Hamilton Grammar School. Malcolm became a chemical engineer and Professor Emeritus at McMaster University in Canada.

In 1933 Margaret started working again as a concert pianist and had two bookings in Glasgow that March. She also did several broadcasts that year and played at a number of concerts in Eastbourne, Bournemouth, and Harrogate with various orchestras. John did not like Margaret being away but eventually got used to it. John had no other interest but television. He worked himself to a state of exhaustion and then had to recuperate in bed half the morning while still keeping in touch with his work through the telephone beside his bed. There was no social life. He never took Margaret to a cinema, and she took him to a symphony concert only once.

In mid-1933, the family moved to 3 Crescent Wood Road in Sydenham, a three-acre property that John had bought near the Baird Company’s laboratories and factory. He worked between his large, modern laboratory in the grounds of 3 Crescent Wood Road and the company offices in Crystal Palace. It was in the Crystal Palace that the company built and tested all the transmitting parts later sold to the BBC for ultra-short wave transmissions.

After the couple’s son was born in July 1935, Margaret’s mother took her first to Tunbridge Wells and then to the south of France, where they stayed at Margaret’s aunt’s apartment in Cagnes-sur-Mer. Margaret took a long time to recover from the difficult birth. One of her sisters-in-law stayed with her at Sydenham when she returned from France.

The family continued living at Sydenham in the late 1930s, where the children had a governess from Lincolnshire, Miss YARKER. There were also two country girls as maids. Margaret was concerned about war breaking out and wanted to return to South Africa. Instead, John rented a furnished house at Minehead in Somerset, and Margaret and the children spent six months there. Margaret organised six concerts, one a month, and among others engaged Garda HALL, a South African singer. She accompanied the soloists and enjoyed working again. John joined them at Christmas. They left Minehead in January 1939 and in April spent three weeks at St Tropez.

World War II

When Britain announced on 03 September 1939 that it was going to war, the first task was to get the children out of London, as everyone expected that Hitler would use gas. John decided on Bude on the Cornish coast and managed to book Margaret and the children into a small hotel there. He remained in London when they left the next day. Bude was a quiet seaside resort, soon to be filled with evacuees. After a week, Margaret found a furnished house to rent. Miss YARKER had gone home, and Margaret looked after the children herself, getting them into a school that had been evacuated from Box Hill. Margaret’s mother left Sutton and joined Margaret and the children at the end of September 1939, arriving by car with her Labrador, cat, four canaries, and a pair of budgies. Later John brought a cat he had rescued in Sydenham.

Margaret visited John in London as often as she could. It became impossible to keep the house at Sydenham going, and John lived in various hotels nearby. Bill, a local postman who used to do some gardening for the family, continued to keep the house in some sort of order, but the windows were shattered twice by blasts from bombs or guns, and all the gates and iron fences were taken to be melted down for armaments. If the weather was good, Margaret would go to Sydenham and try to clean it up, but in bad weather, the family stayed at the Palace Hotel in Bayswater.

John was fast running through his small savings, keeping the family in Bude and two full-time assistants at the laboratory. He suffered a personal loss when his friend Mephy committed suicide at his studio in Herb Cottage in Ryde, Isle of Wight. John rushed off to Ryde, arranged for the funeral, and took over Mephy’s personal effects. He wired Margaret to join him, and they spent two days in Salisbury. Shortly after Mephy’s death, depressed and in ill health, John decided to take a short break outside London and went to a hotel which also advertised medical treatment. He had been in ill health for some time, and the continual air raids, which had blown out the windows of his house and brought down the ceiling of the room where he was boarding, were very upsetting. When he arrived at Tempsford Hall in Bedfordshire, he had a heart attack and saw the resident physician. He was told that he was too fat and the fat was pressing on his heart. The doctor put him on a fast for fifty days. He lost more than 40 pounds. While there, he decided to write his autobiography. He engaged a typist to call at the hotel, and the first chapter of “Sermons, Socks, and Television” was dictated.

John visited Margaret and the children in Bude whenever he could. He would sit in the garden and read stories to the children. He bought them poster paints and showed them how to mix the primary colours to obtain various shades. He bought Diana a magnifying glass, and they set fire to newspapers by concentrating the sun’s rays. He taught the children to make telephones, first with Klim tins and string and later by a more elaborate system which used batteries. These experiments were rather wasted on Diana, but they piqued Malcolm’s interest in his own scientific career. Diana enjoyed walking with her father, exploring the cliffs and lanes of Bude and Stratton.

In November 1942, Margaret played piano with an orchestra in the pavilion at Torquay. She also accompanied Noel EDIE, a Scottish singer in Bude, at concerts for the Red Cross. In 1943 John sat for Donald GILBERT, the sculptor, who cast a bronze bust which John could not afford to buy. A copy is in the Hermitage Park at Helensburgh, and the original is in the National Portrait Gallery.

The war was coming to an end, and John’s health was failing. The journey of eight hours to Bude became too much for him. By 1944, the house in Sydenham was uninhabitable due to bomb damage. Margaret went to Bexhill-on-Sea and found an unfurnished house to rent at 1 Station Road. The Station Road home was demolished in 2007 and the site now houses a development of apartments, named Baird Court. Margaret moved her ailing mother, two children, the birds and animals, furniture from Sutton and Sydenham, and all the things they had accumulated at Bude. The children attended Sandown School, where the headmaster was Stanley SULMAN, a veteran of the Anglo-Boer War.

Margaret did much of John’s correspondence for him at this stage. He was very ill but determined to carry on. In February 1946 John went for a walk, came back tired, went to bed, and had a stroke during the night. He had nurses, as Margaret’s health was at breaking point. Her mother was almost bedridden, and the district nurse visited once a week to help her with her bath. John was restless and ill and wandered around the house. There was a coal fire and an electric heater in every room, but John was always cold, sleeping at night with his electric blanket on. The bill for electricity ran at about £65 a quarter. As summer arrived, he was able to go out for short walks. On 14 June he had a restless night. They settled down, and he passed away during the night, a week after the BBC resumed its television broadcasts. John was buried at Helensburgh. Four months later, Margaret’s mother, who had been staying with the family since 1939, also died.

After John’s death, the family was in financial stress, as his estate was much smaller than expected. Though named as co-executor of his will, Margaret only received her share of about £7,000 more than a decade later. Cinema television ceased to exist after John’s death; without his drive, the new company collapsed. The owners of cinemas, concluding that home television posed a threat to their business, decided against installing television equipment in their venues. Jack BUCHANAN, John’s school friend and financial backer, sold the assets of the new company. Parts of the assets changed hands many times, and by the early 1950s the tradename Baird had become the property of A.W.M. HARTLEY, with a company known as Baird-Hartley Ltd. Mr Hartley arranged a modest annuity for Margaret.

The winter of 1946-47 was a bitterly cold one with power cuts, and Margaret started battling with clinical depression. In April 1947, Margaret and the children left Bexhill-on-Sea and went to live with John’s sister Annie at her home, The Lodge, in in West Argyle Street, Helensburgh, Scotland. Annie was a registered nurse. Margaret received extended care at the Crichton Royal Hospital in Dumfries. The children eventually graduated from Glasgow University.

In 1956, Margaret was living in Harrow and was invited to the Rudolph Steiner Hall in London, where a play, The Life of John Baird, was broadcast through Radio Luxemburg. That year, too, the independent television companies came into being, John’s dream of a monopoly broken coming true. She did a short and informal film for the opening programme of the first transmission of independent television, saying a few words about how grateful John would have been. In late 1957 the BBC asked her for information for their programme “This is your life”. John became the only posthumous subject of the programme.

Return to South Africa

In 1958, Margaret and Malcolm visited South Africa; Malcolm stayed for two months during his university vacation, while Margaret remained for eight months. It was the first time in 30 years that Margaret visited Johannesburg to “see if things were really as bad as the British media reported.” She didn’t find that to be true. A newspaper article about them led to Norman COLLINS of ITV starting a fund for the family, which received generous contributions from many of the leading companies manufacturing television sets in Britain, totalling almost £4,000.

In March 1959, Margaret went to Scotland for the first Baird lecture at the Glasgow Royal College of Science and Technology. The lecture was delivered every other year, and the fund also provided a medal and a prize for students of electrical engineering in their final year. By the time of the first lecture, Malcolm was at Cambridge, working for a doctorate in chemical engineering. Diana had married Norman RICHARDSON in 1958 and was living in Scotland.

In October 1959, Margaret, having recovered from clinical depression, sailed on the Edinburgh Castle for Cape Town, taking her piano with her. She looked for an apartment in Green Point, Cape Town. At the time, she said that “it is very difficult to live in England if you do not have enough money. It’s easier in South Africa, and South Africa’s climate is much better for my health. I do not like the cold.” Her only income since John’s death was a £600 annuity. She also said that “I am not entirely in favour of television for young people, since it is easy entertainment for them. They sit and watch other people do things which they should be doing themselves.” After John’s death, Margaret refused to have a television in her house for many years. In South Africa she taught music at university level, including at the University of Cape Town and the University of Durban.

Margaret recorded a long talk about John and television for the South African Broadcasting Corporation. That year, a pub near the Alexandra Palace was named The John Baird. The opening was attended by Malcolm and celebrities of television and the BBC. In 1960, Margaret visited England to see Malcolm before he moved to Canada. Back in South Africa, she received a letter that Mr Hartley had sold the trade name Baird to the Perring-Thoms’ Radio Rentals group, which had decided to manufacture television sets. Mr Perring-Thoms gathered information from Margaret about John, his friends, and his associates. In 1961, he invited Margaret to England to meet the chairman of the new Baird Television Company with his wife, the directors, and the staff. He had arranged a series of meetings, press shows, lunches, and dinners. On 31 May 1961 a dinner was held at the Dorchester for Margaret. On 13 June she visited Bradford to see the new Baird factory, then with nearly 1,000 employees.

In 1962, Margaret undertook a concert tour of South Africa, playing in 29 towns. She visited Britain in 1963 for the birth of a grandchild and to welcome Malcolm back from Canada. He later left Edinburgh University for Canada again, where he became a professor of chemical engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Radio Rentals arranged a press conference at the Savoy, where Mr and Mrs Perring-Thoms welcomed Margaret. A model of the earliest Baird receiver stood next to the latest television sets. At a reception given for her, she met William TAYNTON, who was a young office boy in 1925 at Cross Pictures. John asked him to sit in front of his transmitter, so he became the first person to appear on a television screen on 02 October 1925. John later employed him in his company. On 26 August, at a dinner at the Savoy arranged by Radio Rentals, she presented the first television travelling scholarships awarded by the Television Society.

In 1964, back in Cape Town, Margaret received a telegram from Radio Rentals to present commemorative silver Baird medallions in London to 30 leading personalities in television. This was at a gala function in the Albert Hall on 16 April. After Mr Perring-Thoms’ death on 31 July 1964, Sir Jules THORNE of Thorne Electrical Industries acquired ownership of the Baird tradename and continued to manufacture Baird television sets. Margaret’s annuity continued.

In November 1964, Margaret paid a short visit to Johannesburg. By then, she had already appeared with the Cape Town Orchestra and given broadcast recitals. In late 1964 she formed a piano duo with Ian SMITH of the Cape Town Orchestra to give recitals in the Cape Town area. In June 1965 Margaret gave a recital at Wigmore Hall in London. She also gave five public performances in Scotland. She had a 35-minute television interview and piano performance in Glasgow. She played at a reception in South Africa House in London. In October 1965 she opened Baird Hall, student accommodation at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. She sailed back to Cape Town on 05 January 1966.

In July 1969 she gave her first recital in Johannesburg for a number of years. She shared the stage in Selborne Hall with Alexander SCHWARTZ, a singer from Cape Town. On 01 May 1975, Margaret was the guest of honour at the television pavilion at the Rand Show in Johannesburg. At the time, she was living in Yeoville and teaching music. At the time she said that “television was the greatest wonder of the century and, above all, the best teaching and communication medium. In Britain, I saw how illiterate people could discuss topics they had seen on TV programs; John was a genius. Had it not been for World War II and being ill for four years, he would’ve introduced television much earlier.” In July 1975 she said that she watched the SABC-TV test programmes with a critical eye and was impressed with the reception and content, especially the nature documentaries. In 1979 she moved to Durban. On 26 January 1983 the Baird Museum was opened by Margaret at the Radio Rentals head office in Percy Street, Swindon. The date was also the anniversary of the first occasion on which John gave a public demonstration of his invention. In 1986, Margaret settled in Scotland, where her daughter lived.

In the early 1930s, one of John’s business connections, Lord Angus KENNEDY, arrived in Cape Town and started setting up a television demonstration. The demonstration was not as great as usual, as equipment was damaged during the sea voyage. The then mayor of Cape Town, A.B. REID, attended the demonstration. Dr A.W. ROBERTS, a scientist, also attended. Lord Angus also held demonstrations in Johannesburg and Pretoria. The first director-general of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), Rene CAPRARA, attended the demonstration in Johannesburg. It would take 47 years before South Africa got television services. By the time that the country’s first broadcast happened, there were more than 200 000 television sets in South Africa.

In May 1959, the Television Society of South Africa was launched at a meeting in Johannesburg of the Radio, Refrigeration and Electrical Appliances Association. G.W.G. BRODIE was the organiser. The Society was open to the public and aimed to create a demand for television in South Africa. Margaret was a member. Mr Brodie stated that in 1956 the SABC had prepared a blueprint for television, but it was never tabled in Parliament. Gideon ROOS, the director-general of the SABC, had travelled to Canada, Britain, the USA and Australia on fact-finding missions. On his return he prepared reports on the state of television overseas. These reports also failed to convince the government to launch television service in South Africa.

John’s career

John was educated at Larchfield Academy in Helensburgh; the Glasgow and West of Scotland Technical College; and the University of Glasgow. While at college, he undertook a series of engineering apprentice jobs as part of his course. The conditions in industrial Glasgow at the time helped form his socialist convictions but also contributed to his ill health. His degree course was interrupted by World War I and he never returned to graduate. At the beginning of 1915 he volunteered for service in the British Army but was classified as unfit for active duty. Unable to go to the front, he took a job with the Clyde Valley Electrical Power Company, which was engaged in munitions work.

Some of John’s early inventions were not fully successful. In his twenties he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite. Later he invented a glass razor, which was rust-resistant, but shattered. Inspired by pneumatic tyres he attempted to make pneumatic shoes, but his prototype contained semi-inflated balloons, which burst. Years later this same idea was successfully adopted for Dr. Martens boots. He also invented a thermal undersock, the Baird undersock, which was quite successful. John suffered from cold feet, and after several trials, he found that an extra layer of cotton inside the sock provided warmth.

In early 1923, and in poor health, John moved to 21 Linton Crescent in Hastings, on the south coast of England. He later rented a workshop in the Queen’s Arcade in the town. John built what was to become the world’s first working television set using items that included an old hatbox and a pair of scissors, some darning needles, a few bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, and sealing wax and glue that he purchased. In February 1924, he demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images. In July 1924 he received a 1000-volt electric shock, surviving with only a burnt hand, and was asked by his landlord to vacate the premises. Soon after arriving in London, looking for publicity, John visited the Daily Express newspaper to promote his invention. The news editor was terrified of the invention and refused to interview John.

On 02 October 1925, John successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy nicknamed “Stooky Bill” in a 32-line vertically scanned image, at five pictures per second. John went downstairs and fetched an office worker, 20-year-old William Edward TAYNTON, to see what a human face would look like, and Taynton became the first person to be televised. By March 1925, John was seven months away from achieving what he considered true television. In November 1924, he returned to London from Hastings. In London, his business partner, Wilfred DAY, arranged premises for John in attic rooms at 22 Frith Street in Soho. From 16 March 1925, he started demonstrating his invention, the televisor, at Selfridge’s. He was paid £20 a week for three weeks, giving three shows per day to the public. One of the visitors was an 18-year-old Margaret. Her mother had read about the demonstrations in the newspaper, and the two women went to Selfridge’s.

On 26 January 1926, John gave the first public demonstration of true television images for members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in Soho. It was the first demonstration of a television system that could scan and display live moving images with tonal graduation. Between 1926 and 1928, he attempted to develop an early video recording device, which he called the phonovision. Technical difficulties with the system prevented its further development, but some of the original phonovision discs have been preserved. John’s other developments were in fibre-optics, radio direction finding, infrared night viewing and radar. According to his son, in 1926 John filed a patent for a device that formed images from reflected radio waves, a device very similar to radar.

In 1927, John transmitted the world’s first long-distance television pictures over 705 km of telephone line between London and the Central Hotel at Glasgow Central station. He demonstrated the world’s first colour transmission on 03 July 1928. In the same year he also demonstrated stereoscopic television. John set up the Baird Television Development Company Ltd, which in 1928 made the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, New York, and in 1929 the first television programmes officially transmitted by the BBC. In November 1929, John and Bernard NATAN established France’s first television company, Télévision-Baird-Natan. From 1929 to 1935, the BBC transmitters were used to broadcast television programmes using the 30-line Baird system. In 1930, John demonstrated a theatre television system, with a screen (60 cm by 150 cm), at the London Coliseum, Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm. The BBC transmitted John’s first live outside broadcast with the televising of The Derby in 1931. From 1933 John and the Baird Company were producing and broadcasting a small number of television programmes independent of the BBC from John’s studios and transmitter at Crystal Palace. By 1939 John had improved his theatre projection to televise a boxing match on a screen 4.6 m by 3.7 m.

By mid-1930, John was focusing on big-screen cinema. He had a big screen mounted on the roof of Long Acre, where he hosted demonstrations. In September 1931, John sailed on the Aquitania for New York to promote his inventions. Twenty years before, John had assisted in building that ship when he was a shipyard apprentice in Glasgow. Arriving in New York, he was met by a band dressed in kilts and playing the bagpipes. He stayed at the Waldorf Astoria, where he had meetings with various businessmen.

While in New York, John signed a contract with his first American client. WMCA, an independent broadcasting station in New York, agreed to use the Baird system to start television broadcasting in New York. John and Margaret went to Washington for ten days, where they gave evidence before the Federal Radio Commission to help get WMCA a licence. After the licence was granted, John and Margaret returned to England. The Radio Corporation of America used a nominee to appeal in federal court against the licence, arguing that no foreign or foreign-controlled company should be allowed to use the airwaves in the USA. The appeal was successful, and the licence was withdrawn. The trip ended up being a waste of money, leading to protests from the board; as a result, John paid half of the expenses himself, and the US office of the Baird company was shut down. In 1933 all programmes, except the experimental, were suspended in the USA.

At 11:02 p.m. on Monday, 22 August 1932, the first programme of the BBC’s television service went on the air. Lasting for 35 minutes, the programme began with Roger ECKERSLEY, the BBC’s Director of Programmes, who welcomed viewers and introduced John. John thanked the BBC and said a few words of welcome before several musical acts performed for the audience. Viewers also saw a performance by a sea lion, some jujitsu, and a painting demonstration. Within two years of the tests starting, extended trials of both John’s system and one developed by EMI and Marconi were commissioned. The EMI system was eventually chosen, and the BBC’s last transmission of the Baird system was on 13 February 1937.

In February 1933, John and Margaret visited Germany. It was very cold, and soon John became ill. One of Margaret’s relatives in Berlin, Dr PLATAU, an ear, throat, and nose specialist, treated John. The couple saw Nazi officials on guard at every stall in the radio exhibition, many of them in the streets, and hands everywhere raised in the Nazi salute. Hitler’s coming to power had a further effect on John’s company. Fernseh A.G., which he had originally formed in Germany and in which he had equal shares with Bosch, Zeiss, and Loewe, was leading German television. The Nazis were interested in the medium. Hitler gave orders that the British share of the company must cease and that Fernseh become wholly German. Eventually, a deal was negotiated for the British share before Hitler could confiscate the company.

In September 1933 John demonstrated high-definition television at the British Association’s meeting at Leicester, using a receiver with a cathode-ray tube. Late in the afternoon of 30 November 1936, a fire broke out at Crystal Palace. A large crowd hindered the firemen, and before they could extinguish the fire, the glass-covered main structure collapsed. Only a few offices under the south tower were saved, though the north tower survived. The fire was disastrous for John’s company. A hundred thousand pounds’ worth of equipment was lost. A good deal of the value was recovered from the insurance, but the loss of valuable records interfered greatly with the transmissions from the BBC. The fire destroyed spare parts and equipment that were on the verge of installation.

On 01 January 1938, John resigned as managing director and became technical adviser to Baird Television Ltd. He withdrew to his private laboratory and concentrated on cinema television. A new company, Cinema Television Limited, was formed which would control Baird Television Limited. The Baird company was reorganised, and John became president. Early in 1938 the Australian government invited John to address the radio convention that was to be held there. He was reluctant to go during negotiations about cinema television, but on 22 February John and Margaret sailed from Marseilles in the Strathaird. The itinerary was filled with functions, lunches, and dinners in Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney, wherever there was a branch of the Institute of Radio Engineers. On arrival in Bombay, there were telegrams from leading personalities in Indian radio. The Maharajah of Kutch invited the couple to a dinner at the Taj Mahal Hotel, where Margaret was the only woman present. John was ill for a week afterwards. Margaret bought some evening dresses at the Army and Navy Stores in Bombay, not having seen the itinerary before leaving England. During their voyage from Bombay to Adelaide, smallpox broke out on board, and after vaccination, they were allowed to disembark in Adelaide. They took the train across Australia to Sydney, missing Melbourne and their arrangements there. John gave a lecture at Sydney University and also demonstrated the cathode-ray tube.

Upon returning to England, they heard the news about changes in Germany. Cinema Television continued, and big screens were installed at several Gaumont cinemas. Baird Television Ltd produced and sold receivers. The businesses continued in 1939 and started prospering. There were 70 cinemas in London with television screens. Sales of receivers were good; there were about 23,000 sets in the London area, and orders were pouring in for Baird home receivers. The sets cost about 50 guineas at that time, and Baird Television Ltd had a staff of nearly 500 men. On 01 September 1939, the BBC’s television service closed down. At 11 a.m. on 03 September 1939, Neville CHAMBERLAIN announced that the UK was at war. John received a phone call that directors of Gaumont-British had put the Baird company into receivership, stopping John’s salary of £4,000 per year. In just two short hours, the family’s source of income disappeared, and John became president of a company that no longer existed.

The staff of the Baird company dispersed into war service. John had been deemed unfit for military service in 1915, so he did not get called up in 1939. He carried on working on colour television at his own expense, keeping two assistants – a general handyman, OXBROW, and a technician, E. G. O. ANDERSON. They worked in a private laboratory at 3 Crescent Wood Road. John submitted his name to the authorities for some form of government work but received no offer.

The family’s financial situation improved when Sir Edward WILSHAW, chairman of Cable and Wireless, employed John as a consultant technical adviser to his firm at a salary of £1,000 per year. John could carry on with his research, while the money was enough to pay for the laboratory and part of the salaries of the two assistants.

On 23 October 1940, John took out a patent for colour television with six hundred lines. He demonstrated it to the press on 14 January 1941, but news of war was more important than news of inventions. During the war, John was occupied by not only colour television but also spent much time trying to invent a new method of transmitting printed matter by television, which he called facsimile television. There was a report in the Manchester Guardian of 17 August 1944. John wanted to revolutionise wireless telegraphy so that complete typewritten pages could be sent at the rate of twenty-five a second to anywhere in the world. In 1944 the current speed, used largely for pictures, was one page every six to ten minutes. In 1946 John died, but others developed the idea further.

In 1943 the military called up Anderson, John’s chief assistant, and this was a disaster as the work he did in the laboratory was vital. John tried to get him an exemption but failed. John appealed, and the appeal was upheld, and Anderson stayed with John until the end. Unbeknownst to Margaret, John was doing secret work for the government, developing signalling through television, radar, fibre optics, and infrared detections. Margaret only found out about his military work decades after his death.

In January 1944 the Hankey Committee was formed to consider the future of television once the war was over. In March 1944, John received a letter from Lord Hankey, asking a series of questions. On 28 March 1945 the Hankey report was published as a White Paper. It recommended that television be resumed on four hundred and five lines as soon as possible after the war, though definition should eventually be a thousand lines, as John had recommended. Meanwhile, John had perfected his last and perhaps greatest invention, the telechrome, an all-electronic system of colour television. On 16 August 1944, he demonstrated it, using a live image of Paddy NAISMITH, an English actress, pilot and racing driver. Together with Jack BUCHANAN, John started a new company, John Logie Baird Ltd., to promote his inventions, which included the telechrome, the world’s first cathode ray tube for colour television. The new offices were in London, with John travelling from Bexhill-on-Sea to London and back. In 1948 Scophony acquired John Logie Baird Ltd. Besides being a man of great vision, a patient, humble, and courageous man, John Logie BAIRD was a man who forged ahead where many others would have stumbled and fallen.

Australian television’s Logie Awards were named in honour of John’s contributions to the invention of television. In 2014, the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers inducted John into The Honor Roll, which “posthumously recognises individuals who were not awarded Honorary Membership during their lifetimes but whose contributions would have been sufficient to warrant such an honour”. In 2023, John MacKAY portrayed John in both the ITV series Nolly and the Doctor Who episode “The Giggle”.